Synopsis: Richard is a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates.
 |
| Photo by Nina Subin |
This biography is lifted wholesale from the unimpeachable source of all knowledge.
Born in East Berlin in 1967, Erpenbeck is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, where she graduated in 1985. She then completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters as props and wardrobe supervisor.
From 1988 to 1990 Erpenbeck studied theatre at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1990 she changed her studies to Music Theater Director (studying with, among others, Ruth Berghaus, Heiner Müller and Peter Konwitschny) at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory. After the successful completion of her studies in 1994 (with a production of Béla Bartók's opera “Duke Bluebeard's Castle” in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles), she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's “Erwartung,” Bartók's “Duke Bluebeard's Castle” and a world premiere of her own piece, “Cats Have Seven Lives.” As a freelance director, she directed in 1998 different opera houses in Germany and Austria, including Monteverdi's “L'Orfeo” in Aachen, “Acis and Galatea” at the Berlin State Opera and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's “Zaide” in Nuremberg/Erlangen.
In the 1990s Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She is author of narrative prose and plays: in 1999, History of the Old Child, her debut; in 2001, her collection of stories Trinkets; in 2004, the novella Dictionary; and in February 2008, the novel Visitation. In March 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2015 the English translation of her novel The End Of Days (Aller Tage Abend) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her son and with her husband, conductor Wolfgang Bozic.
I was only able to find a couple of YouTube videos of Jenny Erpenbeck talking about Go, Went, Gone. This one of a reading and discussion at Harvard University, in my opinion, had the best sound quality. As you will notice, it's an hour and 45 minutes long. She is very soft-spoken and has (of course) a heavy German accent. Enjoy.
